Konstanty Srokowski

The Russian Policy in Poland

The national direction in politics is just as an elementary phenomenon as the radically intransigent direction in the plight of our nation in the Kingdom of Poland. For there is no such situation in which some would have more to lose than to gain and those are, as a rule, uncompromising.

Therefore, examining agreeableness and intransigence as political directions stemming from some objectively expressed premises and demonstrated as a hypothetical syllogism usually gives no result. For both agreeableness and intransigence are, above all, economic tendencies, the former of which, conservative, robes in the so-called political realism; and the latter, in some course of proceedings, seeks support in idealism. Both these tendencies, despite their necessity and absolute divergence which cannot be removed by any ‘consolidation’, share a number of common essential characteristics. Primarily, both of them eventually lead to the point where the obligation of contra spem sperarei arises. For, after all, it is completely indifferent to what absurdity one comes in a consequent consideration of some direction, or to the conviction that amorous successes of a Polish ballerinaii or laying flowers at Catherine’s statueiii, influence the fate of the homeland and that it can be freed by hauling on the Vistula rapid fire cannons to Warsaw, by encouraging the English fleet to bomb Riga and Mitawa or by simply draining the Baltic… The difference between these absurdities is purely formal, as the gravity is completely the same.

This is a state of balance. The life of the nation, as a whole, cannot go towards development tendencies of only one group: agreeable or intransigent, but it must be the resultant of all the strivings present in the nation, of which only the sum is the engine of the nation’s life. Thus, each aspiration in this sum has its justification, and such elementary aspirations as agreeable and liberation ones are indispensable. Should any of them be lacking or should the way of expressing and manifesting it be distorted, it would need to be created and the way would need to be promptly amended. An objective assessment of the power and manifestation of these aspirations must always be based on a clear realisation of what their role is in the nation’s life.

The period of revolutions in the Kingdom of Poland brought about this unfortunate and immoral change in the sphere considered here that the agreeable tendency in our nation, after a brief disappearance, began to manifest itself in this very inappropriate and distorted way. Its old and natural representatives: grand nobility and grand bourgeoise, together with a galaxy of their ideologists, surprised by the events, faint-heartedly stepped down from the field and their place was taken by yesterday’s intransigent who, having found themselves in a situation that could by no means happen under a policy other than agreeable, had to choose their agreeableness ex post. And as they were in haste, the result of this ‘choice’, both practically and ideologically, was disastrous. Life annihilated all arch-artificial, and frequently even amusing, constructions conceived in a rush as ideological support for various political cripples. And national policy, after a three-year experiment of going intransigently agreeable and reverse again became ‘tabula rasa’. The people at the helm of the national vessel were missing a map or a compass. The vessel started to go round in circles helplessly. And in that very moment the old reconcilers come back to light having drawn their old programme from dusty archives and they cry: here is the only reliable route!...

This phenomenon, treated scientifically, is completely normal. Agreeableness is an expression of resignation, resignation is a result of strengths giving out. Our society is weakened and thus agreeableness triumphs. And it is much better that it should return to its previous and right position than flow freely across the entire space of the nation’s life and thinking, silting them with purposeful fraud or morbid hallucinations such as … Neo-Slavism without reservation.

However, this is the case with agreeableness seen from the scientific point. From the point of view of the national policy, from the point of certain specific duties towards one’s nation, only one, but great and essential reproach can be made to the reconcilers and realists emerging again.

Here they should be asked where the honourable gentlemen were, when their realism was the most needed, when there was everything in the nation but sophistication, experience or expertise, which gentlemen realists took with themselves to Vienna to ponder profoundly on the mobility of revolutionary things. At the time when thousands of maids wrote memorials, when soaring dreams of a constituent assembly hovered around streams of shed brotherly blood, when fiery tongues battled for complete or federate independence; then pails of water heated with talent, faith and zeal, poured from the heights of experience and realism, could have perhaps saved that noble flour from useless charring, then some scone could have been baked.

But as the sea was roaring, gentlemen realists were only capable of whispering ‘memorial 23’iv, even Mister Erazm Piltzv, this undoubtedly most talented and most energetic, because the least ‘real’, warrior of realism rushed into resigning from the post he had held for 25 years and handed his position as the editor of Kraj in Petersburg to Mr Kutyłowskivi. It’s none of a craft to produce a settlement when practically no-one argues with anybody, or when one has already their foot on the other’s throat. The role of a reconciler or a mediator begins where a dispute is the most heated, where a battle rages. Then realism has a large scope for displaying its potential, then it is faced with a task of examining and assessing the strength and chances of wrestlers, a difficult, laudable and formative task. In this one and only moment agreeableness can be formative. Other than that, it always is a deadlock and a shift back.

Reconcilers explain that when Wittevii and Chrustalov-Nosarviii were sent telegrams with a demand for a constituent assembly, the fanatical mob would have stoned anyone saying that it was better to content oneself with a small self-government than to demand a republic. Yes, it is true. In the period of revolutions the so-called legality is a crime, in time of a universal exaggeration temperance and common sense are not easily forgiven. Had reconcilers been real agreeableness idealists, had their idealism been indeed idealism, i.e. the bright nature of phenomena’s consciousness and not a mere opportunism, had there been significant heroism of creativity in them, they would have understood and felt that there came a moment when fire needed to be extinguished with their own blood, when it was necessary to make a powerful sound capable of drowning the roar of the storm and to be heard. Reconcilers, as it befits ‘realists’, will reply to this that it was impossible to do as no-one would have listened to them. Yet, do reconcilers actually think realistically that today, when the storm is not raging any more, when amidst the pleasant murmur of cinematographic apparatus in various ‘movie houses’ gentlemen Skalonix and Kaznakovx peacefully sow death; that today amidst this silence the ‘leaders of Russian politics’ will be willing to listen to them? Indeed, it is original realism of thinking and doing politics.

In spite of this, Mr Erazm Piltz, having said farewell to his readers in Kraj and deemed his mission completed, now thinking realistically, came to the conclusion that it should, nevertheless, be resumed. And thus, a few weeks ago, he published An Open Letter to the Leaders of the Russian Politics (List otwarty do kierowników polityki rosyjskiej)1, and having taken the stand of the Russian state, he demonstrates very meaningfully, calmly and yet convincingly all the mistakes the Russian politics made in the matter of Poland over the past forty years.

For us, who know these mistakes, who can still feel their consequences, a summary of Mr Piltz’s arguments intended for the high Russian audience would be needless. Suffice to say, these arguments are precisely logical, very sober, perhaps even dry in tone, and mostly based on official or semi-official data. If any of the ‘leaders of the Russian politics’ in Petersburg really suffered from insomnia caused by the uncertainty about ‘Kak byt’ s Polshey?’(‘How to be with Poland?’), this letter could indeed be salvation for them. So delicately, calmly and perfectly all the faults of the present system of this ‘being’ are expounded. Unfortunately, Mr Piltz himself admits that writing this letter he ‘did not consider’ whether ‘it would reach the spheres it was addressed to’. And this uncertainty about the address on the letter, this sending it poste restante, ‘upon request’, is the most characteristic aspect of Mr Piltz’s brochure, not as some means to some end, but as a typical and characteristic phenomenon. The brochure has a lot in common with that historical album of Wilanów views from the tsarist couple stay in Warsaw in 1897, published and allegedly presented to the Tsar as a gift by Mr Piltz himself. For a long time, opponents of any agreeableness counted this album among the biggest national sins. It was canvassing exaggeration, nothing else. For Mr Piltz, then as well as now, was driven by good will, by best intentions to serve his nation well, and then as well as now, that will was rather good than strong. Had his will been not only good but also strong, had there been in him, like in his other political fellow worshippers, a creative desire to influence and shape the fate of the nation, he would have applied his political thinking method to national life when there was a possibility of changing it for the better, provided such opportunity really existed at all.

However, Mr Piltz hurriedly gave way to others, just as shortly before that he had hurried with warning the nation against the danger posed by horrible ‘revolutionariness’ of national democrats. And were Mr Piltz’s speeches concerned with him, one could infer from them that he himself was a person of excessive sensitivity which greatly hampered realism. But Mr Piltz is also an essential constituent of the agreeable, or ‘realist’, faction’s intellectual approach. He makes plans, he codifies programmes and although in decisive moments he needed to give way to the ‘more beautiful’ or the ‘happier’ ones, he never ceased to be the spiritus movens of the faction. Therefore, when Mr Piltz speaks, the faction speaks. And since the faction speaks like Mr Piltz does, it means that it has nothing to say, that its enunciations are not an outcome of any creative work, but, at the same time, a result and a symptom of a passive adaptation to the events that the likes of Mr Piltz influenced and wanted to influence the least.

The fact that Mr Piltz begins to write lengthy letters addressed to ‘the leaders of the Russian politics. Petersburg. Poste restante’ proves that political life in the Kingdom has completely returned to its initial pre-revolutionary state. A masquerade of programmes and mystification of slogans has ended. The right people begin to say the right things. It is undoubtedly very sad that after four years of struggle, efforts and immense sacrifice we have stood only where a realistically thinking Pole considers it necessary and purposeful to write letters without a specified address. Nevertheless, compared to where we were twelve years ago, when albums with views were delivered to specified addresses, we have come a long way.

Still, the most important is that the political masquerade has come to an end, that would-be revolutionaries no longer choose recruits necessary for quashing their own rebellion, that Anglomaniacs and Europeans, moved by greatly justified contempt for any Russianness, cease to declare ‘unreservedly’ their affiliation with Moscow…

Mr Piltz has never intended to organise an uprising. Neither has Mr Piltz acknowledged his adherence to Neo-Slavism without reservation. Here, his realism withstood the trial by fire. Today, he comes back to the journalistic wrestling arena with his open letter to the leaders of the Russian policy who, as he himself is very well aware, cannot be convinced by letters. This is a resurrection of the old pre-revolutionary method of the so-called sophisticated statements, enunciations and attestations which mislead or harm no-one, and as symptoms of natural agreeableness amongst the conservative spheres of our society are a normal phenomenon and, therefore, amidst the existing abnormalities, even desired. Let reconcilers write and speak, let them knock on the door of the Russian state, inside which they crave to enter. We do not believe in the efficiency of this writing and speaking. Yet, we have no reason to consider it harmful.